The heart of a computer is a magnetic hard disk drive (HDD) which typically includes a rotating magnetic disk, a slider that has read and write heads, a suspension arm above the rotating disk and an actuator arm that swings the suspension arm to place the read and/or write heads over selected circular tracks on the rotating disk. The suspension arm biases the slider into contact with the surface of the disk when the disk is not rotating but, when the disk rotates, air is swirled by the rotating disk adjacent an air bearing surface (ABS) of the slider causing the slider to ride on an air bearing a slight distance from the surface of the rotating disk. When the slider rides on the air bearing the write and read heads are employed for writing magnetic impressions to and reading magnetic signal fields from the rotating disk. The read and write heads are connected to processing circuitry that operates according to a computer program to implement the writing and reading functions.
The volume of information processing in the information age is increasing rapidly. In particular, HDDs have been desired to store more information in its limited area and volume. A technical approach to this desire is to increase the capacity by increasing the recording density of the HDD. To achieve higher recording density, further miniaturization of recording bits is effective, which in turn typically requires the design of smaller and smaller components.
The further miniaturization of the various components, however, presents its own set of challenges and obstacles. The usage of a leading shield and side shields is not new to perpendicular magnetic write heads. These types of shields are used in order to reduce the amount of fringe magnetic fields which are emitted from a tapered leading edge of the main pole. While the leading shield reduces a main pole fringe field which causes adjacent track interference and far track interference, it also has an undesirable effect of reducing a main pole write field, which is already too weak in current perpendicular magnetic write heads for some writing applications. Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a more efficient process for producing a leading and side shield, and a leading and side shield topology which serves as an effective adjacent track interference fringe field shield while at the same time not significantly reducing the main pole's write field.